


The Ghosts of the Elder Sea Tribe

by Ruusverd



Series: Echoes of the Fall AU [19]
Category: Echoes of the Fall - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Bronze Age AU, Gen, Shapeshifters AU, everyone else is there but in the background - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:27:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26046505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruusverd/pseuds/Ruusverd
Summary: Geralt & Co reach the Elder Sea village and find it haunted, and not just by ghosts. Eskel and Geralt have a discussion about the future while dealing with the remnants of their past.
Relationships: Eskel & Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia
Series: Echoes of the Fall AU [19]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863010
Comments: 5
Kudos: 13





	The Ghosts of the Elder Sea Tribe

**Author's Note:**

> *tw:* not suicide exactly, but something suicide-adjacent. I don't know if I should tag this Major Character Death since there's not technically *death* and the character isn't major in this AU, but... if anyone thinks this should be tagged differently let me know.

The warband approached the Elder Sea village several days later. Eskel had warmed to Geralt’s mismatched group during the trip, but the mood of both Wolves turned somber as the landscape around them started to look familiar. Wolves built no roads, but Geralt was sure he could have navigated the land around the Elder Sea village blindfolded, even after so much time.

As the empty village came into sight Geralt felt a mixture of grief, dread, and nostalgia. Judging from Eskel’s expression, he felt the same. Wolf villages had no walls or palisades to define their borders, and the dilapidated longhouses were placed randomly on their artificially raised mounds, without any attempt at making neat rows or regular paths between them. At one end of the village stood the chief’s longhouse, larger and on a higher mound than the others. At the other end stood the priests’ temple, built of stone instead of wood in order to safely hold the large fires needed to work the wolf-iron, and beside the temple the large iron effigy of the Jaws of the Wolf where the priests would make their sacrifices.

The warband stopped in surprise when they noticed a small column of smoke coming from the chief’s longhouse. Looking around the abandoned village more closely Geralt saw makeshift repairs to many of the buildings that looked as if they had been made at different times over the course of many years, all of them definitely after the time of the massacre.

Cautiously he, Eskel, Lem, and Cahir moved in front of the others while Milva and Regis dropped back, ready to take to the sky and attack from above if needed. Ciri tried to shove herself into the front line, but Geralt pushed her behind him and Yennefer grabbed her arm to keep her back. Jaskier stayed near Plotka, looking around nervously.

“Hallo, who’s here?” Geralt shouted, watching the chief’s longhouse while the others kept an eye on the doorways of the other buildings.

The ragged hide that served as a door was pushed aside and a gray-haired man came out. He wore a knee-length iron shirt and held a long iron knife in one hand that was the twin of Geralt’s favored weapon. He glared at them balefully, then stopped in surprise when his eyes fell on Geralt and Eskel. With a pang of shock, Geralt recognized Vesemir Swift Strike, who’d been the Chief of the Elder Sea wolves, and Geralt’s foster father. He’d assumed the man had died or Stepped a final time and gone to the forest years ago.

“Geralt? Eskel?” Vesemir asked in a tone bordering on wonder, before his face darkened to a scowl. “So you finally came back, did you? Who are all these strangers you’ve brought with you?”

“These are my warband, my family. We needed a place to go, and I didn’t think anyone would be here.” Geralt shifted, uncomfortable under the weight of Vesemir’s clear disapproval.

“This is a place of the Wolf! I see no Wolves among them. They have no place here.”

“They are my family,” Geralt repeated insistently. Vesemir’s approval or not, they had nowhere else to go. This village was their only option.

Vesemir came down from the longhouse mound and stormed towards them, snarling. “You call them family? _This_ is your family, _this_ is where you belong, and you left! You’re no true Wolves, to leave your own people and wander around collecting other tribes’ cast offs.”

As the former chief crowded into Geralt’s space and bared his teeth angrily, Geralt abruptly realized that Vesemir was _old,_ even beyond what his years would explain _._ His iron coat had rust creeping over the mesh. It hung loosely on his withered frame, and his face was sunken and gaunt. How long had Vesemir been haunting this village alone, like a living ghost? If he couldn’t move on, why hadn’t he Stepped and joined the mute wolves of the forest?

“We left because you drove us away!” Geralt said defensively, baring his own unnaturally sharpened teeth in return, “We never came back because there was nothing to return _to!_ This is just an empty place with no people to fill it.” He gestured at the warband, “Here are people with no place to go. What’s left here might as well be used again.”

Vesemir raised his knife threateningly, “ _I_ am the chief of the Elder Sea Wolves! You have no right to bring outsiders to live here!”

Geralt heard the warband shifting nervously behind him, and held up a hand to stop them from trying to interfere.

“The Elder Sea Wolves are gone!” Geralt insisted, trying to keep his voice level. “There are less than half a dozen of us left, everyone else has either died or passed on to join the wild wolves. With so few of us remaining I have as much right to this place as you do!” He saw Eskel looking back and forth between them with a worried expression, but ignored his brother for now. Eskel had always been the peacemaker of the two of them, and Geralt didn’t want to hear him side with Vesemir.

“Are you challenging me for leadership?” Vesemir looked shocked at the idea.

“Leadership for _what?”_ Geralt waved his arms at the empty longhouses surrounding them. “There’s no one left here but you! Why would I fight you for leadership of nothing and no one?”

Vesemir looked even more confused, as if he didn’t know what Geralt meant, “This is… this is the Elder Sea tribe, I’ve lived here all my life. _You_ lived here all your life. I became chief thirty years ago when old Broken Stone Stepped and went to the forest.” He looked around, as if expecting his vanished people to reappear at any moment.

Geralt shifted a step back and exchanged an uneasy glance with Eskel, both of them realizing that Vesemir had not just grown old but also gone mad. Geralt wondered if the old Wolf’s mind had broken when his tribe was destroyed, or if his madness had come on gradually over years of living here alone with the ghosts. He supposed it made no difference now. “There is no Elder Sea tribe, Vesemir,” he repeated more gently, “There is no tribe, and with no tribe there’s no chief.”

”There has to be a chief,” Vesemir insisted, “A wolf either leads or obeys, someone has to be chief. That’s the Wolf’s way.”

Geralt looked at the man who had loomed so large over his childhood, and felt only pity and a dim echo of remembered fear. “I don’t want to fight you, Swift Strike. There’s nothing to fight over. But we need a place to stay and we don’t have anywhere else to go, so if you insist on fighting me I’ll do it.”

“Hey! I figured out your ghost problem!” Lem shouted, breaking into the Wolves’ standoff. She had wandered off while no one was paying attention and was looking into one of the longhouses whose hide door had long since rotted away. “This place is full of bones! Human and wolf both!”

“You didn’t tend to the dead?” Geralt stared at Vesemir in horrified shock. “When you ran us off, you said you were going to take care of them! How could you just leave them to rot?”

“I _did_ take care of them! I’ve taken care of them all these years! I didn’t want them to leave!”

“They were dead!” Eskel finally shouted, his scarred face twisted by anger, “You drove us away just so you could _l_ _eave_ _them there?_ They don’t want to stay, they want to go back to the Wolf to be reborn and you trapped them here!”

“Don’t touch them!” Vesemir Stepped and charged at Lem with a snarl. Geralt Stepped as well and ran after him, slamming his shoulder into the older wolf and knocking him away. Vesemir turned on Geralt and the two fell into a snarling whirl of gray-and-white fur and flashing iron teeth. Vesemir’s wolf suffered less from the effects of age than his human form, but Geralt was still younger and stronger, and his wolf was larger. Geralt managed to pin Vesemir down, teeth latched into his scruff. The old wolf went limp in surrender beneath him, and Geralt released his hold and backed away, bristling.

Vesemir staggered to his feet, still snarling but defeated. He retreated and sat by his own longhouse door, glaring venomously as the warband spent the rest of the day carefully building a large pyre outside the village and retrieving the bones of the dead tribe. His fractured mind was obviously warring between the long-ingrained traditions that demanded respect for Geralt’s newly-won leadership, and stopping these strangers from removing the bones he’d stood guard over for so many years. None of the skeletons were identifiable after so many years and many were jumbled together, but Geralt suspected, from comparing their general number and distribution to his own memories, that the old man had laid out each family in their own longhouse as if they were sleeping and might someday awaken.

Burning was usually enough to free souls trapped in a human form, but since these had gone untended for so many years Yennefer and Regis insisted it was safer for them to ritually release the ghosts from the human bones before they were placed on the pyre alongside those that had died as wolves. The resulting collection on the pyre looked both too large and too small to be all that remained of the tribe Geralt remembered.

As the sun dipped below the horizon and the Wolf’s beloved moon shone near-full in the sky, Geralt and Eskel solemnly lit the pyre together and stood side by side watching it burn. As the fire took hold, Vesemir came and stood beside his foster sons, expression blank and unreadable as he stared into the flames. The rest of the warband stood at a respectful distance for a while, then retreated back to the village to set up camp. No one would be sleeping in the longhouses until they’d been thoroughly cleansed.

The three Wolves stood in silence until the flames started to die away. Then Vesemir turned towards his two sons, the fog of madness in his eyes still there but not quite as strong without the ghosts whispering into his mind. He calmly removed his rusting iron shirt and handed it to Geralt along with his knife. “I couldn’t let them go,” he said solemnly, “and I couldn’t leave them behind. Now they’re gone and I’m free to leave. You’ll do as you wish and I can’t stop you, but I don’t want to see anyone else take the place of my people.”

The old man clapped them both on the shoulder, then Stepped for the last time. A subtle change rippled through him as the burdens and grief of Vesemir Swift Strike slipped away, and the Wolf became a wolf in a matter of seconds. The animal looked at them without recognition, then turned and trotted away to the treeline, his gait free and easy and full of confidence as he set out to find his brothers in the forest.

The younger Wolves watched the wolf who had been Vesemir until he was out of sight. Geralt wasn’t sure how he should feel. _How do you mourn someone that you thought dead for years,_ he wondered, _after meeting again for only a few hours,_ _and finding them so changed_ _?_

Eskel clearly wasn’t sure how to react, either. They both sat on the ground side by side and waited for the pyre to finish burning itself out.

“I’m going back to the Many Mouths in the morning,” Eskel said quietly, after several minutes of silence.

“You could stay, if you wanted,” Geralt offered.

Eskel shook his head, “Even if I wanted to, I’d have to go back first. I couldn’t just disappear on them, and my coat and other things are there.”

“Will you come back?” Geralt kept his eyes on the pyre and didn’t look at what expression might be on his brother’s face.

“Of course I’ll come back. I don’t think I’ll come to stay, but I’ll come when I can.” Eskel nudged Geralt with his shoulder. “I like your warband, they seem like good people, but... Wolves are supposed to live with their own kind, Geralt, this isn't the same and you know it.” Even without turning Geralt could feel Eskel studying his profile. “Or do you, after all this time?"

"I don't know," Geralt admitted. "All I know is that I'm happier with them than I was without them. And that I'll never allow the priests of the Wolf to touch Ciri."

"She'll never Step with iron, then."

"Then she'll live without it,” Geralt said, an irritated edge coming into his voice. “Or maybe we'll find another way, a way that doesn't involve the rites."

Eskel was quiet a moment. "Be careful, White Wolf. I understand why you hate the priests, but there's a limit to how far you can push. Living on your own is one thing, that’s your right if you want to, but digging into the secrets of iron is another. Those secrets belong to the Wolf and are revealed only to the Wolf's priests. "

Geralt snorted. He and Eskel had never spoken of the rites once they were over, but if there was a night for dragging out painful memories it was this one. "The forging of iron, yes, that requires secret techniques that belong to the priests, but the ability to Step with it is different. You've been through the rituals, you know as well as I do the Wolf doesn’t actually come and personally grant us the ability."

Eskel stared at him. "What are you talking about?"

Geralt stared back, confused. "Don't you remember what happened during the rites?"

"I remember-" Eskel gestured towards his back and the lines of scars that they shared. "-all of that. I remember the incense, and how much it hurt to cough.Days of no food and drugs in the water. I remember feeling like I was going to die. Thenthe Wolf _must_ have come because the next thing I knew I was a wolf with no memory of having Stepped. The priests were smiling at me and I realized I’d freed myself, that when I’d Stepped I’d carried the iron with me.” He scowled, “I also remember it only took you half the time that it took the rest of us, and that's why they thought they could make a Champion of you. They thought you had the Wolf’s favor or something." He looked at Geralt shrewdly, “Why, do you remember more?”

"I don't have a gap in my memories between thinking I was going to die and Stepping. I remember seeing the Wolf, but he just stood there and watched, he didn’t tell me anything or give me any sign. I don’t even know if he was really there or if it was just a hallucination. I don’t think the Wolf does anything, I think they just kept pushing us harder until between the drugs and the pain we were so desperate to escape we Stepped with the iron still inside us out of pure instinct and blind panic." He shrugged one shoulder, “Or at least that’s what it seemed like to me.”

Eskel shook his head. "You're wrong, either you just didn’t see what the Wolf did, or you did see and now you don’t remember it. No one remembers how it happens, that's why it's still a secret."

“Maybe you’re right. But they always tell us the Wolf never sends help, that helping us would make us weak. I don’t know why the rites of Iron would be an exception.” Geralt shrugged. “Either way, not all Wolves wear iron. If it turns out that there isn’t another way, then Ciri will be fine without it.”

“I don’t understand how you’re going to make her a proper Wolf outside the tribe, iron or no iron. She needs other Wolves around besides you, if she’s determined to be one of us.”

“You could come and stay,” Geralt offered again.

Eskel paused, giving the idea more thought than he had the first time. Slowly he shook his head. “I don’t think I can. I’m not like you, no matter how much I disagree with what the tribes do I couldn’t live without my own kind for so long.”

Geralt nodded. He understood. Despite what Eskel thought, the loneliness ate at him, too. Less so now that he had the warband, but Eskel hadn’t been wrong when he told Ciri that their blended tribe wasn’t the same as having a real wolf pack. He’d followed his wolf when he’d left the tribes behind. He couldn’t fault Eskel for following his own wolf back to them.

“I’ll come and visit, stay for a while as often as I can,” Eskel said finally. “I’m going to tell Lambert and Coen about you being here if I see them, it’s their right to know. They’ll probably come too, even if it’s just to see what you’re doing to the place.”

Geralt shrugged. His words suddenly felt like they were caught in his chest. Too much had happened that day, and he felt like the impact was just now sinking in. He’d known coming back here would be hard, but he’d thought he’d only have to deal with bad memories, and that Yennefer and Regis would handle any lingering ghosts or curses on their own. He hadn’t anticipated anything that had actually happened.

Eskel seemed to understand that Geralt had run out of words, and they sat together in silence, watching the glowing embers of the fire.In the morning life would go on. Eskel would go back to the Many Mouths and Geralt would set to work with his new tribe to finish cleansing the village and making it fit to live in again. But those thoughts could wait for the morning. This night belonged to the Wolf, and remembering what had come before.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry to any Vesemir fans, but it's Witcher canon that all of the dead bodies got tossed in the moat to rot after Kaer Morhen was sacked as a "reminder," even though that should have led to horrible smells, disease, and scavengers at best, and in the Witcher world also necrophages and all kinds of cursed things. Given how much of a witcher's job comes from people not disposing of their dead properly or respectfully, this seems like an absolutely bizarre thing for them to do with an entire keep worth of murdered people. It had to be Vesemir's decision to handle it this way, since even Cat witchers in the books acknowledge Vesemir as being the top authority in charge of all witchers post-sacking. 
> 
> It's also canon that Vesemir continued to live all by himself in the ruined keep surrounded by that moat full of the dead bodies of nearly everyone he'd known, even though there were no trainees left for him to teach and literally no reason for him to stay. Fanon says that all the witchers come back and stay at Kaer Morhen for the winter, but that's never stated in canon. Before he brings Ciri there, Geralt clearly states in the books "No one lives at Kaer Morhen now except Vesemir," which means even if the others do come and stay for a while sometimes, Vesemir lives there full time and spends at least most of that time all alone.
> 
> In short, if Vesemir wasn't already out of his mind when he had all the bodies dumped instead of burned or buried, he should be stark raving mad by the time Geralt brings Ciri home.
> 
> The ritual to make an Iron Wolf is only described in detail once and the character does have some sort of vision, but what she sees is completely unrelated to the ritual and the thing that finally pushes her to Step with iron is absolute bone-deep fear of death, not anything the Wolf magically gives to her. So my headcanon is closer to Geralt's opinion than Eskel's, but it's open to interpretation I suppose.


End file.
